May 16, 2022 When the Myth of Progress Unravels By Alfie Kohn The arc of history is long, but it bends toward catastrophic annihilation. — Barbara Ehrenreich The fact that five religious Supreme Court justices have eliminated women’s right to terminate a pregnancy — a protection representing “a half-century of progress toward a more equal society” — has ... Read More
The post When the Myth of Progress Unravels appeared first on Alfie Kohn.
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'Regenerative' is the new 'sustainable'.
If 'DeFi' means decentralised (i.e. blockchain) finance, 'ReFi' means Regenerative decentralised finance. It was under this banner that 50+ folks met last week in Austria, including superstars Art Brock & Eric Harris Brown (Holo founders) and Shaun Conway from IXO.
NEW PEARL JAM POSTER SALE TOMORROW!
My new Pearl Jam poster, for their 5/3/22 concert in San Diego, will go on sale tomorrow, Thursday May 12 at 10am Pacific time (11am MT/12pm C/1pm EST) at our new site:
printsandtherevolution.art
These are signed, silkscreen, 18 x 24” posters, numbered 1-100. There is a secondary, one-color image on the back of the poster as well as an official Pearl Jam stamp. (More images on our site.) Price is $100 plus shipping.
LIMIT ONE POSTER PER PERSON. In order to be fair, each person can buy one print. PLEASE do not order more than one. The interface for the site will not allow me to regulate that, but if we receive an order for more than one print we will VOID and REFUND the order. We hope you understand - we are trying to do this out of fairness.
The FOMC announced it will begin reducing the size of the Fed’s balance sheet in June 2022. How will such reduction work, and how long will it continue?
The Reserve Bank is pushing up interest rates to take money out of our hands.
The first increase in the current round will add about A$65 a month to the cost of paying off a $500,000 mortgage.
The second will add a bit more. If, as the bank’s forecasts assume, there are another four such increases this year, that’s a further $275 a month, and so on.
The point, in the words of the Reserve Bank Governor Philip Lowe, is to “slow the economy, to get things back onto an even keel”.
In a helpful video, the Governor explains that rate rises take money out of mortgagee’s hands directly, make it harder to borrow, make people “feel less happy”, and hit the prices of houses and other assets so people “don’t feel as confident and they don’t spend as much”.
As always, if you enjoy this work, please consider helping me keep it sustainable by joining my weekly newsletter, Sparky’s List!
Brexit has devoured its unionist children, helping to deliver the sense of an ending for Northern Ireland as we know it
In 2021, a hundred years after the creation of Northern Ireland, Boris Johnson tweeted: “Let me underline that, now & in the future, Northern Ireland’s place in the UK will be protected and strengthened.” Since the word “not” has to be inserted automatically into every positive statement Johnson makes, unionists ought to have taken this as fair warning: Year 101 of Northern Ireland’s existence would be its equivalent of George Orwell’s Room 101, where you are confronted by your own worst nightmares.
The BBC has today announced Ncuti Gatwa is the new Doctor set to take charge of the TARDIS.
Star of stage and screen, Ncuti is best known for his critically acclaimed performance in Sex Education as the iconic Eric Effiong, for which he was awarded Best Actor Award at the Scottish BAFTA’s in 2020 as well as numerous nominations including Best Male Performance in a comedy programme at this year’s BAFTA’s.
Speaking of his new role, Ncuti said:
The BBC has today announced Ncuti Gatwa is the new Doctor set to take charge of the TARDIS.
There is the war, and then there is the war about the war. Vladimir Putin’s assault on Ukraine is being fought in fields and cities, in the air and at sea. It is also, however, being contested through language. Is it a war or a “special military operation”? Is it an unprovoked invasion or a […]
The post Our Hypocrisy on War Crimes appeared first on The New York Review of Books.
My new cartoon for the Los Angeles Times.
One of the stranger things about the Reserve Bank’s announcement of why it’s lifting interest rates by 0.25 percentage points is that it suggests inflation will come down by itself.
“A further rise in inflation is expected in the near term,” the RBA says, “but as supply-side disruptions are resolved, inflation is expected to decline back towards the target range of 2-3%.
So why raise rates now, for the first time in more than a decade? The bank says it is about "withdrawing some of the extraordinary monetary support that was put in place to help the Australian economy during the pandemic”, which is fair enough.
But our latest burst of inflation is weird, and resistant to rate hikes. If the Reserve Bank isn’t careful, too many more rate hikes like this might help bring on a recession.